Our
Words Are Our Weapons
Against the Destruction of the World by Greed

By Rebecca Solnit

October 29, 2012 "Tomdispatch"
-- In ancient China, the arrival of a new dynasty
was accompanied by “the rectification of names,” a ceremony
in which the sloppiness and erosion of meaning that had
taken place under the previous dynasty were cleared up and
language and its subjects correlated again. It was like a
debt jubilee, only for meaning rather than money.

This
was part of what made Barack Obama’s first presidential
campaign so electrifying: he seemed like a man who spoke our
language and called many if not all things by their true
names. Whatever caused that season of clarity, once elected,
Obama promptly sank into the stale, muffled,
parallel-universe language wielded by most politicians, and
has remained there ever since. Meanwhile, the far right has
gotten as far as it has by mislabeling just about everything
in our world -- a phenomenon which went supernova in this
year of “legitimate rape,” “the apology tour,” and “job
creators.” Meanwhile, their fantasy version of economics
keeps getting more fantastic. (Maybe there should be a
rectification of numbers, too.)

Let’s
rectify some names ourselves. We often speak as though the
source of so many of our problems is complex and even
mysterious. I'm not sure it is. You can blame it all on
greed: the refusal to do anything about climate change, the
attempts by the .01% to destroy our democracy, the constant
robbing of the poor, the resultant starving children, the
war against most of what is beautiful on this Earth.

Calling lies "lies" and theft "theft" and violence
"violence," loudly, clearly, and consistently, until truth
becomes more than a bump in the road, is a powerful aspect
of political activism. Much of the work around human rights
begins with accurately and aggressively reframing the status
quo as an outrage, whether it’s misogyny or racism or
poisoning the environment. What protects an outrage are
disguises, circumlocutions, and euphemisms -- “enhanced
interrogation techniques” for torture, “collateral damage”
for killing civilians, “the war on terror” for the war
against you and me and our Bill of Rights.

Change
the language and you’ve begun to change the reality or at
least to open the status quo to question. Here is Confucius
on the rectification of names:

“If language is not
correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is
said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains
undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will
deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand
about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no
arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above
everything.”

So
let’s start calling manifestations of greed by their true
name. By greed, I mean the attempt of those who have plenty
to get more, not the attempts of the rest of us to survive
or lead a decent life. Look at the Waltons of Wal-Mart fame:
the four main heirs are among the dozen richest people on
the planet, each holding about $24 billion. Their wealth is
equivalent to that of the
bottom 40% of Americans. The corporation Sam Walton
founded now employs 2.2 million workers, two-thirds of them
in the U.S., and the great majority are poorly paid,
intimidated, often underemployed people who routinely depend
on government benefits to survive. You could call that
Walton Family welfare -- a taxpayers' subsidy to their
system. Strikes
launched against Wal-Mart this summer and fall protested
working conditions of astonishing barbarity -- warehouses
that reach 120 degrees, a woman eight months pregnant
forced to work at a brutal pace, commonplace exposure to
pollutants, and the intimidation of those who attempted to
organize or unionize.

You
would think that $24,000,000,000 apiece would be enough, but
the Walton family sits atop a machine intent upon
brutalizing tens of millions of people -- the suppliers of
Wal-Mart notorious for their abysmal working conditions, as
well as the employees of the stores -- only to add to piles
of wealth already obscenely vast. Of course, what we call
corporations are, in fact, perpetual motion machines, set up
to endlessly extract wealth (and leave slagheaps of poverty
behind) no matter what.

They are generally organized in such a way that the
brutality that leads to wealth extraction is committed by
subcontractors at a distance or described in euphemisms, so
that the stockholders, board members, and senior executives
never really have to know what’s being done in their names.
And yet it is their job to know -- just as it is each of our
jobs to know what systems feed us and exploit or defend us,
and the job of writers, historians, and journalists to
rectify the names for all these things.

Groton to Moloch

The
most terrifying passage in whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg’s
gripping book
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
is not about his time in Vietnam, or his life as a fugitive
after he released the Pentagon Papers. It’s about a 1969
dinnertime conversation with a co-worker in a swanky house
in Pacific Palisades, California. It took place right after
Ellsberg and five of his colleagues had written a letter to
the New York Times arguing for immediate withdrawal
from the unwinnable, brutal war in Vietnam, and Ellsberg’s
host said, “If I were willing to give up all this... if I
were willing to renege on... my commitment to send my son to
Groton... I would have signed the letter.”

In
other words, his unnamed co-worker had weighed trying to
prevent the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of
people against the upper-middle-class perk of having his kid
in a fancy prep school, and chosen the latter. The man who
opted for Groton was, at least, someone who worked for what
he had and who could imagine having painfully less. This is
not true of the ultra-rich shaping the future of our planet.

They
could send tens of thousands to Groton, buy more Renoirs and
ranches, and still not exploit the poor or destroy the
environment, but they’re as insatiable as they are ruthless.
They are often celebrated in their aesthetic side effects:
imposing mansions,
cultural patronage, jewels,
yachts. But in many, maybe most, cases they got rich
through something a lot uglier, and that ugliness is still
ongoing. Rectifying the names would mean revealing the
ugliness of the sources of their fortunes and the grotesque
scale on which they contrive to amass them, rather than the
gaudiness of the trinkets they buy with them. It would mean
seeing and naming the destruction that is the corollary of
most of this wealth creation.

A Storm Surge of
Selfishness

Where
this matters most is climate change. Why have we done almost
nothing over the past 25 years about what was then a
terrifying threat and is now a present catastrophe? Because
it was bad for quarterly returns and fossil-fuel portfolios.
When posterity indicts our era, this will be the feeble
answer for why we did so little -- that the rich and
powerful with ties to the carbon-emitting industries have
done everything in their power to prevent action on, or even
recognition of, the problem. In this country in particular,
they spent a fortune sowing doubt about the science of
climate change and punishing politicians who brought the
subject up. In this way have we gone through four “debates”
and nearly a full election cycle with climate change
unmentioned and unmentionable.

These
three decades of refusing to respond have wasted crucial
time. It’s as though you were prevented from putting out a
fire until it was raging: now the tundra is thawing and
Greenland’s ice shield is
melting and nearly every natural system is disrupted,
from the acidifying oceans to the erratic seasons to
droughts, floods, heat waves, and wildfires, and the failure
of crops. We can still respond, but the climate is changed;
the damage we all spoke of, only a few years ago, as being
in the future is here, now.

You
can look at the chief executive officers of the oil
corporations -- Chevron’s John Watson, for example, who
received
almost $25 million ($1.57 million in salary and the rest
in “compensation”) in 2011 -- or their major shareholders.
They can want for nothing. They’re so rich they could quit
the game at any moment. When it comes to climate change,
some of the wealthiest people in the world have weighed the
fate of the Earth and every living thing on it for untold
generations to come, the seasons and the harvests, this
whole exquisite planet we evolved on, and they have come
down on the side of more profit for themselves, the least
needy people the world has ever seen.

Take
those billionaire energy tycoons Charles and David Koch, who
are all over American politics these days. They are spending
tens of millions of dollars to defeat Obama, partly
because he offends their conservative sensibilities, but
also because he is less likely to be a completely devoted
servant of their profit margins. He might, if we shout loud
enough, rectify a few names. Under pressure, he might even
listen to the public or environmental groups, while Romney
poses no such problem (and under a Romney administration
they will probably make more back in tax cuts than they are
gambling on his election).

Two
years ago, the Koch brothers spent
$1 million on California’s Proposition 23, an initiative
written and put on the ballot by out-of-state oil companies
to overturn our 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act. It lost
by a landslide, but the Koch brothers have also invested a
small fortune in spreading climate-change denial and
sponsoring the Tea Party (which they can count on to oppose
climate change regulation as big government or interference
with free enterprise). This year they’re
backing a California initiative to
silence unions. They want nothing to stand in the way of
corporate power and the exploitation of fossil fuels. Think
of it as another kind of war, and consider the early
casualties.

“Across Africa, Asia,
and Latin America, hundreds of millions are struggling to
adapt to their changing climate. In the last three years, we
have seen 10 million people displaced by floods in Pakistan,
13 million face hunger in east Africa, and over 10 million
in the Sahel region of Africa face starvation. Even those
figures only scrape the surface. According to the Global
Humanitarian Forum, headed up by former U.N. secretary
general Kofi Annan, climate change is responsible for
300,000 deaths a year and affects 300 million people
annually. By 2030, the annual death toll related to climate
change is expected to rise to 500,000 and the economic cost
to rocket to $600 billion.”

This
coming year may see a dramatic increase in hunger due to
rising food prices from crop failures, including this
summer’s in the U.S. Midwest after a scorching drought in
which the Mississippi River
nearly ran dry and crops withered.

We
need to talk about climate change as a war against nature,
against the poor (especially the poor of Africa), and
against the rest of us. There are casualties, there are
deaths, and there is destruction, and it’s all mounting.
Rectify the name, call it war. While we’re at it, take back
the term “pro-life” to talk about those who are trying to
save the lives of all the creatures suffering from the
collapse of the complex systems on which plant and animal as
well as human lives depend. The other side: “pro-death.”

The
complex array of effects from climate change and their
global distribution, as well as their scale and the science
behind them makes it harder to talk about than almost
anything else on Earth, but we should talk about it all the
more because of that. And yes, the rest of us should do
more, but what is the great obstacle those who have already
tried to do so much invariably come up against? The oil
corporations, the coal companies, the energy industry, its
staggering
financial clout, its swarms of
lobbyists, and the politicians in its clutches. Those
who benefit most from the status quo, I learned in studying
disasters, are always the least willing to change.

The Doublespeak on
Taxes

I’m a
Californian so I faced the current version of American greed
early. Proposition 13, the initiative that froze property
taxes and made it nearly impossible to raise taxes in our
state, went into effect in 1978, two years before
California’s former governor Ronald Reagan won the
presidency, in part by catering to greed. Prop 13, as it
came to be known, went into effect when California was still
an affluent state with the best educational system in the
world, including some of the top universities around, nearly
free to in-staters all the way through graduate school. Tax
cuts have trashed the state and
that education system, and they are now doing the same
to our country. The public sphere is to society what the
biosphere is to life on earth: the space we live in
together, and the attacks on them have parallels.

What
are taxes? They are that portion of your income that you
contribute to the common good. Most of us are unhappy with
how they’re allocated -- though few outside the left talk
about the fact that more than half of federal
discretionary expenditures go to our
gargantuan military, more money than is spent on the
next 14 militaries combined. Ever since Reagan, the
right has complained unceasingly about fantasy expenditures
-- from that president’s
“welfare queens” to Mitt Romney’s attack on Big Bird and
PBS (which consumes
.001% of federal expenditures).

As
part of its religion of greed, the right invented a series
of myths about where those taxes went, how paying them was
the ultimate form of oppression, and what boons tax cuts
were to bring us. They then delivered the biggest tax cuts
of all to those who already had a superfluity of money and
weren’t going to pump the extra they got back into the
economy. What they really were saying was that they wanted
to hang onto every nickel, no matter how the public sphere
was devastated, and that they really served the ultra-rich,
over and over again, not the suckers who voted them into
office.

Despite decades of cutting to the bone, they continue to
promote tax cuts as if they had yet to happen. Their
constant refrain is that we are too poor to feed the poor or
educate the young or heal the sick, but the poverty isn’t
monetary: it’s moral and emotional. Let’s rectify some more
language: even at this moment, the United States remains the
richest nation the world has ever seen, and California --
with the richest agricultural regions on the planet and a
colossal high-tech boom still ongoing in Silicon Valley --
is loaded, too. Whatever its problems, the U.S. is still
swimming in abundance, even if that abundance is divided up
ever more unequally.

Really, there’s more than enough to feed every child well,
to treat every sick person, to educate everyone well without
saddling them with hideous debt, to support the arts, to
protect the environment -- to produce, in short, a glorious
society. The obstacle is greed. We could still make the
sorts of changes climate change requires of us and become a
very different nation without overwhelming pain. We would
then lead somewhat different lives --
richer, not poorer, for most of us (in meaning,
community, power, and hope). Because this culture of greed
impoverishes all of us, it is, to call it by its true name,
destruction.

Occupy the Names

One of
the great accomplishments of Occupy Wall Street was this
rectification of names. Those who came together under that
rubric named the greed, inequality, and injustice in our
system; they made the brutality of debt and the subjugation
of the debtors visible; they called out Wall Street’s
crimes; they labeled the wealthiest among us the “1%,” those
who have made a profession out of pumping great sums of our
wealth upwards (quite a different kind of tax). It was a
label that made instant sense across much of the political
spectrum. It was a good beginning. But there’s so much more
to do.

Naming
is only part of the work, but it’s a crucial first step. A
doctor initially diagnoses, then treats; an activist or
citizen must begin by describing what is wrong before
acting. To do that well is to call things by their true
names. Merely calling out these names is a beam of light
powerful enough to send the destroyers it shines upon
scurrying for cover like roaches. After that, you still need
to name your vision, your plan, your hope, your dream of
something better.

Names
matter; language matters; truth matters. In this era when
the mainstream media serve obfuscation and evasion more than
anything else (except distraction), alternative media,
social media, demonstrations in the streets, and
conversations between friends are the refuges of truth, the
places where we can begin to rectify the names. So start
talking.

Rebecca Solnit is the author of thirteen books, a TomDispatch regular, and
from kindergarten to graduate school a product of the California
public education system in its heyday. She would like the
Republican Party to be called the
Pro-Rape Party until further notice.

In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)